crm and certifications

what have i been up to - well a slow month of chasing tails really:

crm update rollup 5 has been released including some fixes for the outlook client stability

we spent a long time fixing issues with crm:
1. when changing the account owner in crm it cascades changes to all child objects - as regards our system it changed all cases to be owned by the account manager and updated the modification (closure) date to be yesterday (all cases ever worked on were closed yesterday by an an account manager - great) obviously this messed our statistics up completely. luckily we were able to access the underlying database using a msdn blog hint and update the modification date based upon the date of the resolution.

The important thing is to change the default settings in the customise entities section for each entity so that cascade is disabled which prevents entity changes affected childs. What a horrible default setting - cant wait for crm v.5

2. another strange one is the smart matching - we use a program to convert emails to cases and send automated replies etc to let the customer know the case ID and about updates. the default crm action is to smart match based on the subject - if he customer emails our support address using the same subject it links it to the previous case (often closed sometime before). Another horrible default that will be fixed in v.5 (the hash timeout of the subject and sender will be configurable). The fix in this case is to disable smart matching which means a new case is always raised. If its a previous issue its possible to easily re-link the email, but at least the engineers see it. More details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2009/06/23/how-to-toggle-smart-matching-in-microsoft-dynamics-crm-4-0.aspx

CCNP activities slowed down as some problems at cisco certifications meant much confusion about our partnership levels. Luckily we are fairly careful and pro-active in this area. Partnership speciality requirements have changed over the last year, but we are maintaining all ours - 4 exams had to be passed by me on my own let alone our account manager and other engineers here. We now maintain the following specialities:

• smb partner
• select partner
• premier partner (foundation express)
• unified communications express partner

and coming soon (now that i can get on with the real exams):

• routing and switching partner
• unified communications master partner